JULY MIX: The Faster Times Wants 2 Get Hot & Sticky With U

Each month, The Outlet posts a mix specially curated by writers, editors, and the otherwise musically inclined. These summer jams were brought to you by the staff of The Faster Times.

1. “Let Me Love You” by Blossom Dearie: Picked by Rachel Shukert, Writer: It’s light and happy and carefree and a little sad. It always reminds me of a summer romance you know will have to end.

2. “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by The Sundays: Picked by Oliver Miller, Writer: I was driving with the girl that I was in love with, and her ex-boyfriend, and we were driving through the Welsh countryside, which is apparently very hilly.  So we were driving through the hills, and it was summer, and apparently there are lots of sheep in Wales as well, in addition to there being a lot of hills — and anyway, so, it was the lambing season, and on every hilltop, there were one or two or three baby sheep, and then this song came on the radio. And it was such a good song, and I was twenty-one, and there I was, surrounded by baby sheep, and also surrounded by the girl I loved who was never going to love me back.


3. “Kingston Market” by Harry Belafonte: Picked by Mandalee Meisner, Designer: Make yourself a rum drink and listen to this or anything by Harry Belafonte, and it’ll chase your “Damn, I’m stuck in an office when I should be in Jamaica” blues away.

4. “Sister” – Prince: Picked by James Yeh, Indie Books Editor: An incredibly catchy, brief, and transgressive song about incest from The Purple One’s game-changing 1981 album Dirty Mind. Clocking in at just one minute and 32 seconds, “Sister” catches Prince at his most bizarro, wild, and surprising pop genius. The song also, amazingly, almost unbelievably, contains the filthiest three lines I’ve possibly ever encountered in pop or, really, anywhere: “She don’t wear no underwear, she says it only gets in her hair—and it has a funny way of stopping the juice.”
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Blake Butler MARATHON: Night 1

1. Drew Lerman, who is a fiction MFA student at Sarah Lawrence, & Lindsay Hunt, a food writer and photographer. 2. Readers Justin Taylor & Brendan Sullivan.

Once upon a time, not very long ago, a young man submitted a story to a website called Fifty-Two Stories. The man who ran the website loved the story written by the young man, so much that he published it on his website that very day. Soon, the story became more than a story: it became a novel. The man with the website loved the young man’s new novel and decided it needed more than an ordinary reading to celebrate it. It needed a marathon reading, a reading where the whole entire work would be read over four nights by a host of wonderful writers. And so it was done.

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Things Get Heated at Literary Death Match

Cunnilingus quickly emerged as the unifying theme of Thursday night’s Literary Death Match. With three females and a Sarah Lawrence man competing, the subject seemed inevitable.

The first combatant to read was Melissa Petro, author of Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry, who wooed the audience with a story of youthful experimentation and portentous deflowering. Benjamin Hale, author of the forthcoming The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, countered with a tale of primal urges between a primate and biologist.

The next bout pitted Rachel Shukert, author of Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour, against Dasha Kelly, author of Hershey Eats Peanuts. Rachel, the first to strike, regaled the crowd with a tale of a lost crown and sexual assault at the hands of Italian dental hygienists.  Dasha stood her ground, countering with a combo of poems, recited from memory: one about the quest and conquering of orgasm, the other about our collective place in history.

The competition was fierce, but a sophisticated panel of judges arose to the occasion.  The trio consisted of: Bruce Benderson, author of The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, who judged literary merit and smoked a smokeless, electronic cigarette; songstylist Michael Hearst, of the band One Ring Zero, who critiqued performance and admitted that he felt like Howie Mandel on America’s Got Talent; and Elna Baker, on sabbatical from the Church of Latter Day Saints and author of The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, who weighed in on the “intangibles” and enlightened the audience on the realities of “moose kisses.”

Melissa and Rachel were the evening’s finalists, the title ultimately conferred upon Rachel following a round of audience members pelting the pair with balls of duct tape symbolizing cholera (apparently there’s history there: August was once cholera season in New York, and consequently became the month that the publishing industry chose to vacate the city).

What did Rachel think of her victory? “I’m thrilled to have vanquished my enemies,” she said. “Although I contracted cholera and will soon die in a pool of my own bloody stool, at this moment, victory is sweet.”

–Benjamin Samuel is an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, will begin an MFA at Brooklyn College this fall, and was voted by his high school as Most Likely to be Seen at the Diner.